A third round of budget meetings had Montgomery city officials crunching the numbers Wednesday.
There's a lot of wheeling and dealing at a city budget meeting. Each department head states his need for money and then the negotiation begins.
The fire chief asked for 32 million, but had to settle for a budget of 30.5 million dollars.
Part of the money will cover incentives for EMS employees and new equipment purchases including a pumper truck, ladder truck and rescue unit.
Chief Miford Jordan, Montgomery Fire Department, says “I feel like we got everything we needed, it's going to be a tight budget, I had some concerns about what I needed to do and the funding that was provided to get it done but I feel like if we manage it well we can accomplish it.”

Fire and rescue wasn't the only department looking for extra money in the budget. The head of the communications center negotiated with the mayor for additional staff.

Larry Fisher, Chief of Department of Communicaitons, says “I wanted to get to our authorized strength of 55. We are currently limited to 49 positions, the mayor allowed us to go up for that one position which still leaves us five short but he also authorized 2 other positions for the technical services that service all our programs and systems in the city.
The department is getting an additional 154,000 dollars up front plus they have 200,000 dollars in unspent money from last year. Their total budget is $5,154,000.
“We feel we can conduct operations, the problem will be if we need to expand operations if necessary and we're very dependent on our size based upon what the police department, the fire department, and other public safety agencies need,” said Fisher.

Mayor strange says the city will under spend around three million dollars, but there's a reserve fund if money is needed,.
“We're going to have a budget that is less than 218 and we're going to continue the services, in fact I think we're going to improve the services, we won't have any new taxes to the citizens of Montgomery probably a fee or two that will have modest increases as we go forward, but we're going to have a good budget,” said Strange.
Another round of budget meetings will be held on Friday.